For those of you who don't know what a NDS is. It is a Nintendo DS, there latest version of a Gameboy. I got one at x-mas. I know, I know, I am a little old for that, but I don't care.

Anyhow, I have a supercard and supercard lite bundle so that I can play homebrew games on it. I have found some awesome ones, including Warcraft Tower Defense. There are some excellent applications as well, like DSOrganize.

I want to write my own application. I don't know what it will be yet, but I got set up last night. There is a an excellent tutorial I found that describes how to set things up. There is a 15 day tutorial with most days completely documented, but still room for some improvements.

Last night, I did Day 1. It took me about half and hour and I installed Visual C++ Express 2005, devkitPro, and palib. I created a new project for my NDS, compiled it, and ran it inside the DeSmuMe emulator to test it.

Necessary Files

If you want to set up for yourself, follow the instructions there. There are a few little intricacies and environment variables you need to know about. I couldn't possibly document better than they have there either. You will need to download the following applications though. Don't install them until you have read the instructions on Day 1.

• devkitPro Updater
• .NET Framework 2.0 (if you don't already have it)
• PALib Installer

And if you really want to use Visual C++ Express 2005, download these two.

• Visual C++ Express 2005
• PALib App Wizard

Going Forward

Further on in the tutorial there are basic instructions on the C programming language and features of the Nintendo DS. I have done a lot of C programming in the past so I'm sure I will be fine. Learning the limitations of the hardware will be the big learning curve I think. To do a game requires understanding of sprites and other techniques I have never done, so it should be interesting.

I will document whatever project I start and what I learned along the way. Will post some source code too.

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Category: NintendoDS

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